Sociographs: Visualizing Social Relationships

Data visualization is the new frontier in data analytics. Solutions such as Qlikview and Tableau are driving the enterprise in memory data visualization market. Niche players like Aquire (workforce data visualization) have taken data visualization domain specific. In the recent months I’ve seen a number of applications/services that draw sociographs of users social networks. Examples of social data visualization are http://fourgraph.me/, http://inmaps.linkedinlabs.com/ and http://apps.facebook.com/friendwheel.

The image below is a visualization of all the social linkages within Facebook.

Project Palantir is also interesting as it show the same social linkages, but as a dynamic visualization.

Now imagine what these graphs would look like in static and dynamic format if they were parsed from information security logs in an enterprise.